barely alive
by vix vivere
Summary: she once met a man with no scars—gruvia au


_Prompt: each time someone lies, a scar appears somewhere on there body and the bigger and nastier the lie, the uglier and deeper the scar._

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He was a good person deep down, even if he didn't seem like it at times. Everyone knew that. Juvia figures that she's probably never going to meet someone like him ever again, because she knew it would be foolish to expect to.

People like Gray just don't come around often. Once in a millennium maybe, if you're lucky enough.

Almost everyone Juvia has met she has seen little thin scars of white-lies on their fingertips. It's the price of being human, scars. Everyone has a few, some deeper than other from years of being reopened time after time again. And the large ones, long lines of silver decorating the shins, forearms, necks or backs, the monstrous life-changing lies. That's just the way life is, people lie.

Joining the army was what Juvia wanted. That was a lie she told herself, over and over again, actually. She wanted everybody to be proud of her, she wanted to change herself for the better. Those were lies too, scratching deeply and stretching to the most visible of parts of her body and never seeming to completely heal.

She joined the army because she felt as if there was nothing left for her in the world. That was the truth this time. She joined as a last resort to keep herself from hitting the bottom of the scale. Though among the many successful heroes of war, she kept her head down and eyes low. Just thinking about being there she felt out of place. Out of line.

But then there was General Fullbuster.

Juvia had more scars than most of her fellow army soldiers, making it hard to earn even a snippet of trust. Yet if people were cold and uncomfortably polite with her, they were visibly rigid with General Fullbuster. He didn't have any white-lie marks decorating his finger tips, he didn't have cuts or nicks stretching along his arms or neck. He had none. He had no scars. At first glance, you would have thought him the most trustful man alive. Most people did. A man in his late teens or early twenties with no scars? That's like finding a real life dragon! But he was real, just standing there plain as day.

So everybody liked him those first couple days. Everybody wanted to be on good terms with him because, who wouldn't? In a large crowd of cheats and liars, you find one with no scars representing lies on his skin. Who wouldn't want someone they could trust?

That was before he took off his shirt randomly at one point in the day (they all learned later that this is because he had a stripping habit, of all things) because before their eyes they all saw one hideous, ugly mark that almost stretched across half his back. A single lie, but the most gruesome Juvia's ever seen. From the looks of it, it was still a bit tender but a tiny portion of it was healing, a rugged tear recovered again.

It was the same lie. You can just tell things like that sometimes. You can also usually tell how many times it was told. But there was no telling how many times he told _that thing._

He rarely even spoke to begin with, just calmly stating orders and commands. He instructed basically the same as every other General did. Even after they all saw his scar, he was still as respectful, trustful and as calm as ever. But nobody could get that hideous mark out of their minds. It was deep, ugly and down-right terrible. Someone who was telling a lie like that was someone you had to keep an eye on and your distance far.

Shooting drills. They do them often. But that day someone must have forgotten themselves, or gotten careless. Regardless of what the reason was, a shot was still fired when it wasn't supposed to. Time slowed down and they all stood real still, watching that kid as he fell to the ground, probably not processing what just happened to him. She always thought he was far too energetic and not to mention strange, with pink hair and a scarf wrapped around his neck. She regrets those thoughts as he sees the shock in his poor onyx eyes.

He was just a kid.

That's when General Fullbuster caught him. All the shouting and panicking occurred from there on out. Cries for the medic and the first-aid kit were all that could be heard throughout the camp as people ran different directions.

Juvia knew that she probably wasn't going to make a single difference no matter what she did. She wasn't a hero, after all. She didn't deserve to be, after everything she had done. So she sat there, watching as the General held the poor pink-haired boy who was bleeding out onto the dirt floor and listened to the words that cut deep into the depths of her soul. Over and over again.

" _Hang on. Hey, hey, look at me. You're gonna be alright,"_

" _You're gonna be alright."_

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damn my writing still sucks, what's new. ok so after a whole year i recently found the password to this account again and I deleted all my old stories because they were really _really_ bad. I'm probably going to make a random one-shot every now and then because I tried multi-chap stories and I only continued them if they were like three chapters or somethin' so I decided one-shots are the best for me.

also this is inspired by a story I read on tumblr like a year ago. And i changed my user, it used to be EndlessFairy24 i think.

anyways, thanks for reading!


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